Faster than the speed of light

There are a lot of myths about science, not least that it proceeds in an orderly manner, cool, detached and unemotional. In the 1960s, philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn rather put the kibosh on that. Scientists, he said, get attached to paradigms, the orthodoxies of their day. When cracks appear, they paper over them, or rather, find ways to make sense of them within the terms of the paradigm. It’s only when the cracks become unsustainably large that a new paradigm emerges, and even then it tends to be the next, younger generation of scientists who accept the change. Science, mired as it is in the messy world of human affairs, proceeds as a series of revolutions, with all the connotations that word implies.


The news that a group of Italian scientists may have measured neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light seems to have opened the very first crack in the Einsteinian paradigm (in which it is a fundamental truth that nothing travels faster than the speed of light). What I find fascinating is the almost light-speed with which physicists have rushed to defend current orthodoxy. Einstein’s predictions have been proved right time and again, they say. We cannot leap to hasty conclusions. Even the Italian scientists daren’t publish their results, for fear of committing scientific heresy. Instead they’ve invited the scientific community at large to try and find out what they’ve done wrong. Dispassionate? Hardly.

The first cracks in my own faith in science opened while I was still an undergraduate thanks to a brilliantly taught module on its history and philosophy. It heralded my eventual move across the floor to the humanities.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not anti-science. Far from it.

No, my beef is with scientists’ certainty, the swagger with which they typically assume they will eventually understand everything, the confidence that theirs is the one true way. Such hubris, surely, is unfounded by history, in which all scientific theories have eventually been proved if not wrong then not totally right. Neither can it be proved experimentally, by the tools and methods of science. It’s rather a belief, a creed. Science, in spite of its largely (though not exclusively) atheist stance, behaves remarkably like a religion.

Those racing neutrinos may yet prove to be beholden to Einstein’s commandments but I’m sure I’m not alone in willing them across the finish line. If the observations prove correct then we’ll be able to witness first hand the machinations, intrigue and blood-letting of a full blown Kuhnian revolution. And if that injects a little humility into science then so much the better.

Terence McKenna and me

In 1993, when I was still a whippersnapper in my twenties, I managed to get myself invited to the Secret McKenna Workshop, organised by the late Fraser Clark. The title seemed to imply that Terence would be passing round the DMT or some other exotic drug (not really his style, I know), but in fact it was just a chance to hear him talk about his unorthodox ideas in intimate surroundings. I still feel privileged to have been there.


I wrote about the workshop in Shroom but what I hadn't realised until just the other day was that I'd recorded it in my diary. At the risk of exposing my inner Adrian Mole, I thought I'd share what I'd written here (OK, with the really embarrassing bits taken out). Over the intervening years I'd forgotten quite a lot of the detail. Here goes, my comments in square brackets:

"Feb 10th: On Tuesday night we got a strange phonecall from Fraser Clark of Evolution Records no less, inviting us to a McKenna workshop (by recommendation only!) Apparently he'd seen us on the video of the Shamanarchy in the UK launch party at Whirl-y-gig and that was recommendation enough. I initially said no (£30 each!) but when you get a personal invite, you have to go, don't you?

"It was held in this bizarre, acid-test-like, squatted veggie restaurant, Fungus Mungus, on London's Battersea park Road, and I met some cosmic people there [I think I probably meant this as a compliment]. One guy was the first person in the UK to be busted for hash in the 60s. He then founded International Times. Far out. There was Martyn, a healer who told me about how we make ourselves ill; the band Tribal Drift; Matthew aka Boris and his Bolshy Balalaika; and of course, Fraser - what a love [he proved slightly less amorous after reading Shroom...].

"McKenna just blew my mind. Whilst I accept but don't relish his ideas of the apocalypse, I really 'dig' the idea of reconnecting to Planetary Mind, the Goddess Earth. Perhaps the apocalypse could be when all minds are plugged in together to form the one?

"We crashed the night [not, I recall, without considerable blagging on our behalf] and met a lovely guy the next day called Cicero who made us a cup of tea. All in all a most excellent adventure."

If the self-consciously hippy language now grates, then I'm relieved to see that it was always the more earthly aspects of McKenna's ideas that resonated with me. As you can probably guess, I'm no longer a fan of the timewave and 2012, regarding them as extensions of Christian apocalyptic thinking (chapter coming out next year). But leaving aside the fact that it was an unacknowledged rehash of Mircea Eliade and therefore not unproblematic in itself, I still respond to McKenna's call for an archaic revival. Then, as now, it was the possibility of connection that excited me.

McKenna's hope was that a return to psychedelic shamanism might help redirect our attention away from ourselves (just for a moment!) and towards the other-than-human persons with whom we share our home. Almost twenty years, and a lot of head-scratching later, I'm still with him.

Taking the Piss: Reindeer and Fly Agaric

One of the more persistent myths about the fly-agaric mushroom, Amanita muscaria, the familiar red and white-spotted mushrooms of fairy-tale, the uber-shroom, is this: that in the Arctic, where there is a history of intentional fly-agaric use, people wait to find a reindeer intoxicated on the mushrooms, then collect and drink its urine to get high.


While it's true that the active ingredients of the fly-agaric, ibotenic acid and muscimol, are excreted unmetabolised, that human urine can be, and is, thusly consumed, and that reindeer do get off on the mushroom, the reindeer-urine part of the story always seemed to me to be a little far-fetched, a confabulation. When researching Shroom I could find no evidence for it. I mean, think about it - how would you actually collect urine from a bemushroomed reindeer staggering about the tundra?

Well, it turns out I was wrong.

This week I made my annual visit to the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance and there I met a reindeer herder, with herds in both Britain and Scandinavia. We got chatting and I asked him whether it was true that reindeer have a taste for human urine. Quite true. They'll lap it up from the snow. And then, unprompted, he told me the following story.


Once, while living amongst the Saami, his hosts started feeding reindeer with fly-agarics, which the deer consumed with some relish. Waiting for nature to take its course, the fruits of micturition were collected in a bucket (strapped to the animals' flanks perhaps?), boiled up in a pot (I'm guessing to concentrate the brew or perhaps to make it more potable) and shared round.

"I don't drink and I've never taken any drugs" he told me. "But I took some when they passed it round. Well, you have to, don't you? They expect it. Anyway, I was high as a kite I was, high as a kite. There was an old eighty year old grandmother with us, and I fancied her, that's how high I was. High as a bloody kite!"

So there you have it. A report from a credible witness that some Saami do drink fly-agaric-imbued reindeer urine and that the effects are palpable. I stand corrected.

The Lie of the Land

I'm delighted to have been asked to write a seasonal column for the ever more wonderful Spiral Earth, increasingly the hub for all things folk-related. It's called The Lie of the Land: Folk, Folklore and Other Curiosities and you can now read my first article, musings on the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance.

St Giles Fair

Not long after the August Bank Holiday, when the last lingering sunshine slinks away and the chilly morning air smells of back to school, my adopted home of Oxford grinds to a halt. The great milling throngs of tourists who clog the streets like knot-weed have for the most part gone; the students are not yet back in their college play-pens. For two brief days Oxford town breathes out, sharpens its elbows and reasserts itself with a shonky swagger. St Giles, the broad and busy thoroughfare that leads to Woodstock and Banbury in the North, is shut off and becomes home to a fair: St Giles fair, one of the most famous in Britain.


The fair itself is a miracle of planning. Somehow, amidst the signs and traffic islands and public toilets and trees the rides are jockeyed in, levered into place, chocked up on wood-blocks. Each unfurls from its truck like a flower, garishly airbrushed in Athena pinks and blues, pushing hydraulics and taste to the limit. Alongside the traditional favourites – carousels, dodgems, a waltzer and a helter-skelter – there are more modern hair-raisers. Storm whirls crates of people around on a sixty foot propeller. Mega Drop winches people eighty foot up a metal scaffold and then plummets them to within feet of the pavement. Rock Rage is a giant’s claw that pendulums people nearly to the top storey of a Georgian terrace, spinning them with more degrees of freedom than a charmed atomic particle.



The gaps between the rides are crammed with burger bars, hooplas, shies, shooting parlours and a genuine gypsy fortune teller.



Excitable teenage girls flit by self-consciously, arm in arm, chewing Wrigleys and puffing Marlboros. Anxious North Oxford parents chaperone their children past sweet stalls, inappropriate rides, and Barton boys, all bling and baseball caps and bow-legged cool. Bored security guards in outsized fluorescent jackets amble about while coppers in shirt-sleeves wear candyfloss smiles. Just beneath the grinding rattle of the generators you can make out the ever-present thrum of danger.

At night the tempo becomes even more frenetic. A jostling whirl of people are out for thrills. Every ride blasts out thumping eighties disco, as if Stock, Aitken and Waterman were the final word in pop. The showmen, calling you to part with your cash for three minutes dalliance with gravity, skip about in an edgy two-step shuffle, oblivious to the perils of the grinding machinery just feet behind them.


It’s a bustling, throbbing, cacophonous bedlam, two glorious days and nights where the world is turned momentarily upside down and Oxford comes out to play. I love the noise and the smells and the crowds and the excitment. I love the inconvenience of it. I love that somewhere a Health and Safety Officer's blood pressure is going through the roof. I love that it's unstoppable.

And come 6 am on the Wednesday morning it’s all gone, vanished as quickly as it came. Only the jolly Green Man grotesque, peering down from St John’s College with a tipsy grin, gives you the slightest hint that anything out of the ordinary happened at all.

More on Peter Aziz

On the matter of Peter Aziz, had a letter published in the Guardian today, alongside one by Dr Ben Sessa (one of the organisers of Breaking Convention). A beautiful pincer movement, it couldn't have worked better if we'd planned it...

Up yon spiritual mountain

One of my favourite textbooks, that I refer to again and again, is New Religions: A Guide edited by Christopher Partridge. Apart from an, ahem, outstanding entry on eco-paganism it contains informative and unbiased entries on over two hundred New Religious Movements (NRMs), from Ananda Marga to the Temple of the Vampire.



While scholars argue about the numerical and social significance of NRMS, I like the book because it demonstrates that contrary to the expectations of secularism, and whatever its origins, the religious impulse is not just alive but positively thriving. I find the sheer breadth of human ingenuity in response to the matter of meaning oddly comforting. We just won’t give up.

Of course, when presented with so many religions, each with its own ideas about what makes a spiritual life and each convinced that theirs offers the only way (else what would be the point?), it becomes hard to privilege one’s own set of preferences (in my case a sort of non-aligned, ad hoc, shamanistic, animistic, psychedelic paganism). Why mine and not yours? The kind of atheist who cares about this sort of thing (and is therefore, paradoxically, as likely to be as fervent as the most zealous religionist) could easily seize upon the sheer diversity of religions as evidence for their collective falsehood. Religions can’t all be right so obviously they are all wrong.

Myself, as I’ve wobbled between belief and disbelief, acceptance and despair, I’ve actually reached a rather similar conclusion – that all religions are equally wrong (if we can leave the Aztecs & Co. aside for simplicity’s sake). For me this is a profoundly optimistic position.

On a good day, like today, I think that there is a sacred or divine or spiritual or self-organising or transcendent or whatever-you-want-to-call-it dimension to the world (the truth of which cannot be proved or disproved but must be accepted or rejected on faith) but the act of so-naming it reduces it to that which it is not. Every worldview (and yes, I include science here) touches a facet but cannot grasp the whole. Language is simply not equipped to do so. (In case you’re interested I’ve arrived at this position from Henri Bergson’s writings about time and Ian McGilchrist’s work on the divided brain, about which I’ll say more at some stage).

What religions do, therefore, is provide a set of metaphors and extended metaphors (rituals, prayers, myths, hymns, gestures, dispositions, techniques – all the stuff that makes a religion a religion) by which the Other might be apprehended, indirectly, from the side, as it were. So I call myself a pagan because nature and the sherds of certain pre-Christian religions provide me with effective and personally resonant metaphors that literally ‘carry me over’.

My position is a kind of revision of the perennialism advocated by Aldous Huxley and others. Far from being different paths up the same spiritual mountain I see religions as different mountains, whose peaks offer a unique but limited perspective on what there is to see.

Accepting that all religions are equally wrong encourages humility in oneself and tolerance of others. For while it will jar with those, atheists or religionists, whose need for certainty is paramount, a position in which all religions have something to say means, at the very least, we ought to do them the courtesy of listening. Chris Partridge’s book provides an excellent place from which to begin.

Good things, bad things

The news that our nominal spiritual leader, the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams, is not only a big fan of the Incredible String Band but is regularly to be seen at Robin Williamson gigs, tapping his foot in the front row, strikes me as a thoroughly good thing. I've always admired Williams' thoughtful approach to the moral questions of the day and the way he steadfastedly refuses to make simplistic judgements on complex matters. That he finds the ISB's music holy makes me like him all the more.

Less good is the news that shaman Peter Aziz is facing a fifteen month stretch for holding an ayahuasca ceremony in Somerset. How long, I wonder, until the powers that be take a more thoughtful approach to the matter of psychedelics and come to regard them as holy?

Spirit of the Beehive

This programme, Spirit of the Beehive by Nina Perry who made the excellent radio documentary about Oxford's Catweazle Club, looks like a must-listen.